Here's an earlier thread with info on replies 16, 28, and 32.
Also, in Texas(and CA), the price of electricity is tied to the price of natural gas. This was done back in the 90s when Texas was moving to deregulate the power industry and covert a sizable portion of Texas power from coal to natural gas.
In doing this, they had to protect the nat gas plants from rising nat gas prices, so they would tie the price of electricity to nat gas. The conventional wisdom at the time knew nothing of the advances in fracking which today has given us a surplus of natural gas and a really, really cheap price for nat gas.
Back then after Katrina the price of nat gas went thru the roof and a lot of people bet on a high price of nat gas. The biggest leveraged buy-out in US history was TXU to create Energy Future Holdings and Luminant and they are now in bankruptcy. Sarah Palin replaced Frank's pipeline with her pipeline and had to resign as Guv when the price of nat gas collapsed. Boone Pickens lost a lot of money on wind.
Tis story is very one-sided. The system has generation facilities that set idle. But the kick in the rate payers butt is that ERCOT pays the HIGHEST price. That means if a generation company is charging $50 mwh but the demand in a day in July calls for kicking in the standby generators, and the owner of a facility wants $4500 mwh, everyone in the system gets to charge that $4500 mwh.
This is why Texas now has some of the highest rates in the country since it ‘deregulated’ the system.
There’s an ocean of brackish water under the west texas scrub. Brackish means the water is slightly salty. Its much cheaper to desalinate than sea water because the salt content of sea water is 4-8 times saltier.
Traditionally windmills were used to pump up water from wells.
All they need to do is harness the night time production of windmills— when electricity prices are dirt cheap— to pump up and desalinate water out in west texas—and suddenly they have fresh water that’s cheap enough to water high end crops growing on land that’s dirt cheap.